Gardening Blogs

Saturday, December 02, 2006

I'm not sure what Al Gore would think of my theory, but it seems to me that over the past couple of years, the weather patterns have bumped up a whole month here in North Texas.

When I moved here in 1989, January and February used to be the really crappy months. December was always pretty decent. Well, not anymore. Nowadays, November remains mild, and as soon as December hits, the bad weather comes with it. And the springs are hotter now too. The past few Junes have been almost unbearably hot...like July usually is.

So yeah, it got down to 23° the other night. Nothing in my community garden veggie plot is flat-out dead, but there was significant leaf scorching. I shudder to think what would have happened if hubby and I hadn't covered the whole thing with frost cloth before the storm came.

The Purple Orach took a beating, as you can see here:

The Savoy Cabbage still looks glorious, though!

The Front Yard Garden Project stood up admirably to the ice and cold temperatures. It was my plan, of course, to only put in stuff that could take the rough Texas weather -- on both extremes -- and I'm happy everything has lived up to expectations so far.

I'm trying not to let the onset of winter depress me too much. The cold weather does bring unique pleasures. For instance, I could sit at the kitchen table for hours and watch the half dozen or so mostly female slate-colored juncos that congregate right outside the window. It is like having a bunch of miniature gray chickens in the yard, with all the pecking and soil-scratching. Adorable. They're an ornery bunch, though, and twitter at me angrily when I go outside for the mail and temporarily break up their little hen party.

2 Comments:

Seems the same down here in Central Texas. We get our September weather in October and our October weather in November. The first freeze is a week later. I have old articles that said the average frost date in Austin was November 20th and this year I heard it was December 2.

This year has been crazy, I don't know if its Global Warming, El Nino, or the Apocalypse, but up until last week its felt like summer. I live in South Carolina (I actually work at park seed/wayside gardens, I see you have our link-yay!) and its usually warm, but this year has been insane.